Missing Boy, 3, Found in Bowling Alley Toy Claw Machine

A 3-year-old Nebraska boy who disappeared from his apartment turned up at a bowling alley across the street happily playing with stuffed animals inside a claw machine.

“I really don’t think he noticed any of us outside the machine because he was just picking up stuffed animals and putting them down where they come out of,” Rachell Hildreth, a bartender at Madsen’s Bowling Alley and Billiards in Lincoln, Neb., tells KLKN-TV.

The boy went missing on Monday night, apparently slipping out of an unlocked door while his mother was in the bathroom, according to police.

When officers got to the apartment they were told that a boy matching the child’s description was spotted at the street in the bowling alley across Dudley Street.

The boy apparently got in through the prize hole, the machine’s owner, Jim Lakey, tells KLKN.

“You have to weave your way in and out, so he had to work pretty hard to get in there,” he says. “It’s kind of a rarity.”